Primeur magazine

Edition: weekly - Issue:
2011-05-30

EuroFlash

Altair Engineering Inc.'s 7th CAE Technology Conference attracted over 300 engineers and simulation experts from UK industry confirming the 7th CAE Technology Conference as one of the most important events in the UK engineering calendar.
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A team of physicists at the University of Innsbruck, led by Philipp Schindler and Rainer Blatt, has been the first to demonstrate a crucial element for a future functioning quantum computer: repetitive error correction. This allows scientists to correct errors occurring in a quantum computer efficiently. The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journalScience.
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Constraint-based approaches facilitate the prediction of cellular metabolic capabilities, based, in turn on predictions of the repertoire of enzymes encoded in the genome. Recently, genome annotations have been used to reconstruct genome scale metabolic reaction networks for numerous species, including Homo sapiens, which allow simulations that provide valuable insights into topics, including predictions of gene essentiality of pathogens, interpretation of genetic polymorphism in metabolic disease syndromes and suggestions for novel approaches to microbial metabolic engineering.
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In the world of high performance computing, the prevailing wisdom is: "If you're standing still, you're falling behind", as advancements in the field often come at a fast and furious pace. But this also means that sometimes, you need to slow it down a notch and reflect on how those changes are shaping the HPC environment.
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Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have succeeded in encoding data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam, transmitting them over a distance of 50 km, and decoding them successfully. This is the largest data volume ever transported on a laser beam. The process developed by KIT allows to transmit the contents of 700 DVDs in one second only. The renowned journalNature Photonicsreports about this success in its latest issue (DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2011.74).
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Sandia National Laboratories and supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc. are forming an institute focused on data-intensive supercomputers. The Supercomputing Institute for Learning and Knowledge Systems (SILKS), to be located at Sandia in Albuquerque, will take advantage of the strengths of Sandia and Cray by making software and hardware resources available to researchers who focus on a relatively new application of supercomputing. That task is to make sense of huge collections of data rather than carry out more traditional modelling and simulation of scientific problems. Sandia and Cray signed a co-operative research and development agreement (CRADA) to establish the institute.
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Lockheed Martin Corporation has entered into an agreement to purchase a quantum computing system from D-Wave Systems Inc. Lockheed Martin and D-Wave will collaborate to realize the benefits of a computing platform based upon a quantum annealing processor, as applied to some of Lockheed Martin's most challenging computation problems. The multi-year contract includes a system, maintenance and associated professional services.
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Computational scientists at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and HP Labs are achieving speed-ups of nearly 10 times with GPUs (graphic processing units) versus CPU-only code - and more than 1000 times versus an implementation in a high-level language - in k-means clustering, a critical operation for data analysis and machine learning.
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Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is utilizing Zenoss to provide event/fault management and monitoring for 13 of their 16 supercomputing clusters including RoadRunner which contains more than 24,000 nodes and is one of the most powerful computer systems in the world.
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The University of Arizona (UA) department of electrical and computer engineering has been selected by graphics technology company Nvidia as one of its teaching centres. Nvidia supports almost 50 CUDA Teaching Centers around the world - in Europe, China, the Middle East, and North America.
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The long, slow decay of carbon-14 allows archaeologists to accurately date the relics of history back to 60,000 years. And while the carbon dating technique is well known and understood - the ratio of carbon-14 to other carbon isotopes is measured to determine the age of objects containing the remnants of any living thing, the reason for carbon-14's slow decay has not been understood. Why, exactly, does carbon-14 have a half-life of nearly 6,000 years while other light atomic nuclei have half-lives of minutes or seconds? Half-life is the time it takes for the nuclei in a sample to decay to half the original amount.
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IBM has unveiled new software and services to help clients more effectively gain competitive insight, optimize infrastructure and better manage resources to address Internet-scale data. For the first time, organisations can integrate and analyze tens-of-petabytes of data in its native format and gain critical intelligence in sub-second response times.
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Penguin Computing, experts in high performance computing (HPC), have installed a supercomputer cluster at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC). The Penguin system, called Pacman, was originally installed in early 2010, and then expanded in early 2011. It is a workhorse system, serving a highly diverse set of users and their computational science applications. Research conducted at ARSC includes climate and weather modelling, ice sheet modelling, oceans physical and ecological systems, materials science, and engineering.
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LG U+, a communications service providers in South Korea, has deployed an integrated solution using Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management and Oracle Communications Network Integrity to model, discover and manage its existing 3G and planned 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network.
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Researchers from North Carolina (NC) State University have developed two new techniques to help maximize the performance of multi-core computer chips by allowing them to retrieve data more efficiently, which boosts chip performance by 10 to 40 percent. To do this, the new techniques allow multi-core chips to deal with two things more efficiently: allocating bandwidth and "prefetching" data.
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HP has launched a new consulting service that addresses the complexities and reduces the risks associated with the strategic direction, design and building of data centres. The HP Trusted Advisor service offers HP consulting experts who work closely with clients to consider all aspects of business operations, IT infrastructure and facilities, as well as the enablement of technologies, such as Cloud and green computing. As a result, clients can establish an aligned data centre and IT strategy that meets business goals and objectives.
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IBM is donating one of its Intelligent Cluster computing solutions to Union College, providing the school with the greatest computing capability of any undergraduate liberal arts college in the nation.
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At Citrix Synergy where virtualization takes centre stage, Citrix Systems introduced "Project Olympus", a groundbreaking new Cloud infrastructure product based on the popular OpenStack project. By leveraging OpenStack, Project Olympus inherits all the collective experience and innovation of hundreds of experienced open source Cloud developers - and a rapidly growing list of more than 60 supporting commercial hardware and software vendors. As a result, Project Olympus helps customers build real infrastructure-as-a-service Clouds that are scalable, efficient and open-by-design, because they use the same architecture, approach and technology that powers the largest and most successful Clouds in the world. This approach stands in stark contrast to first-generation solutions that try to simulate Cloud environments by adding proprietary management layers on top of existing data centre virtualization stacks.
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According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market increased 12.1% year over year to $11.9 billion in the first quarter of 2011 (1Q11). This is the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth, as server market demand continued to improve around the world. Server unit shipments increased 2.5% year over year in 1Q11 to 1.9 million units, which is the second highest quarterly total ever reported in the first calendar quarter of any year.
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At Citrix Synergy, Citrix Systems has launched two powerful new Cloud networking products designed to seamlessly connect enterprises to external Clouds. The first is NetScaler Cloud Gateway, which sits at the "front door" of corporate data centres giving IT an easy, unified way to orchestrate the delivery of any mix of SaaS, web and Windows apps to end users. The second is NetScaler Cloud Bridge, which sits at the "back door" of corporate data centres, giving IT unlimited capacity by seamlessly and securely extending any data centre to any external Cloud service. Both products are built on a common service delivery fabric provided by the recently announced NetScaler SDX platform.
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Veeam Software is adding support for Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server to Veeam Backup & Replication, the leading data protection solution for virtual environments used with more than 1.5 million virtual machines (VMs) worldwide.
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The University of Toronto has selected quantum physicist Sandu Popescu to receive the prestigious John Stewart Bell Prize for his enormous contributions to the field of quantum mechanics.
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HP and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. have united once again to create the studio's action-packed 3D film "Kung Fu Panda 2". For ultimate performance, production artists at DreamWorks Animation relied on powerful HP Z800 Workstations to achieve industry firsts while designing everything from whirling water and lush green lands to battle scenes filled with thousands of kung fu characters.
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Zenoss Inc., a next generation provider of management software for physical, virtual, and Cloud-based IT environments, has made available their monitoring solution for applications built on Cloud Foundry, the open platform as a service. Available as a free, open source product, Zenoss monitoring solution for Cloud Foundry allows developers and operators of applications built on the Cloud Foundry platform to maintain real-time inventory, health and performance of their Cloud-based applications and underlying components. To help ensure a consistent end-user experience, automated monitoring and service assurance are essential for Cloud-based applications.
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